You may have never heard of the late poet Audre Lorde, but to call her the poet laureate of the feelings-trump-reason camp would not be inaccurate. Railing against the canons of Western civilization, she wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Jillian Kay Melchior reports it would be a mistake to overlook Lorde’s influences on college campuses.
Lorde believed “true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action,” comes from “our feelings.” In another essay she wrote, “‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding.”
If you think this antirational rhetoric is being marginalized, guess again. Melchior reports on student activism at the University of Pennsylvania, where students “took down a portrait of Shakespeare in the English Department, replacing it with a printout photo of Lorde.”
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